Week 3: Junior to Intermediate Dev

What is this series?

I've been a developer for 2 years but my learning lacked focus. With this series, I want to look back at what I've done for 6 months to move towards being an intermediate developer.

TLDR

• [GOAL] 32 Github contributions a month.
• how to measure performance for an A/B test

Measuring my impact on Github

As of Feb 17, 2023, I've made 39 contributions. I've heard this is a shallow metric of productivity and impact. However I do want a metric to see how often I'm writing and reading code, so this will do for now. 39 contributions is on the low end of what I'm seeing for intermediate developers. Their in the 50-70 range. I'm seeing senior and staff engineers make 100+ contributions within ~7 weeks.

If you're interested in what counts as a contribution.

Learning how to A/B test

As an engineer on the experimentation team, I'm responsible for implementing and getting the metrics for features we're A/B testing.

We broke up the users into three groups. Users who were on the loading page for

1. <10s
2. 10-30s
3. >30s

We were interested in how many of those users clicked our CTA when presented the treatment vs control loading page.

The general formula to see performance of treatment was

$$treatmentPerformance = \frac{treatmentNumClicks - controlNumClicks}{controlNumClicks}$$

treatmentPerformance is the percentage that treatment performed when compared to control as a baseline. ie - treatmentPerformance = 5% means that treatment did 5% better than control.

Unfortunately treatmentPerformance was negative for each user group, meaning the experiment failed.

Cool [Random] learnings

• China is losing the microchip war. US is forcing Taiwan(lynchpin in microchip supply chain) to choose sides. Beginning of new cold war? Was the old cold war about supply chain?
• How am I being intentional about finding my dream job? Right now I'm focused on building career capital by working on my writing skills and my programming skills.

Comments

[Medea]

nice!